Oscar Wilde

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work _x000D_ is new, complex, and vital.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.